Essma Imady: Thicker than Water

The refugee experience has taken hold of the news and social media. However, the typical refugee narrative centers around the journey one must take to remove oneself and one’s children from danger to safety. For her MAEP exhibition, Essma Imady meditates on the nuances not told in the news—specifically, the anxiety that refugee parents face. She will create a new body of work that explores the tension inherent in the emotions that refugee and immigrant parents experience—safety and fear, familiarity and strangeness, nostalgia and heritage. Her new body of work inspires conversations on what we pass on to our children.

A filmmaker, sculptor, and installation artist, Imady grew up in Damascus, Syria, and left to study art in the United States in 2011. She received her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2016. Her work explores the missing narratives within the art world.